Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Release early, release often? - What about a new release?
Don't want to start a flaming or anything like that there ;)
> That's not a very user friendly point of view.
>
> "Why should I take care of the preference settings, I was
> able to copy
> things over so others can do this as well"
>From what I can watch in real life Wireshark/Ethereal usage, people
often change system on which they are using Ethereal/Wireshark and this
is rarely an issue to re-create the preferences nor use the default one.
That's what they do. I never saw anyone saving its preferences and
re-importing them in its new installation. I didn't do it (and I'm an
heavy user :) ). But this is just my personal experience.
> You're showing a point of view that I hate by a lot of open source
> projects (especially the wiki implementations I had a look at). I
> personally don't want to spend my whole life with all the
> programs I use
> to tinker settings after upgrading until it's working again.
> It should
> just update and work again as before.
That was not my point. I was just pointing out that this wasn't so much
of a problem, witnessing practices I see around me. I might just be
wrong - that's fine.
> ...
> However, a lot of open source developers seem to think that keeping
> things simple for the developers is more important than
> keeping things
> simple for the users. I'm personally disgusted about this
> point of view,
> even for a project biased towards "power users".
Open Source projects, like any other software activity I know of, is
about balancing the constraints. This is what you (Wireshark core team)
are doing by prioritizing bugs, setting release dates, ... Some projects
might have user friendliness as a lower priority than new features or
more security or developer availability or ...
So, if the first Wireshark release date is not the highest priority,
then great, there is no problem.
Olivier.
